Le cygne
by Selective scifi junkie
Summary: Natalia Romanova does not mourn. Natalia Romanova does not get drunk or cry. Yet sometimes, even spiders need a way to hide, to repair themselves. Pre film cannon. Fairly strong K for memory of violence, some of it rather depraved.


**Summary: Natalia Romanova does not mourn. Natalia Romanova does not get drunk or cry. Yet sometimes, even spiders need somewhere to hide**

**Set: Shortly after Romanova defected to SHIELD**

**Genre: Friendship/general**

**Rating: K+ for mention of violence and creepiness. **

**Disclaimer: These characters and this world are not mine. They belong solely to Marvel. The content and narrative have been influenced by Eliot Rosewater's fic 'The Music Box', which I strongly recommend.**

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Natalia Romanova slunk through the corridors of the SHIELD base, silent and undisturbed. She couldn't sleep, she didn't want anyone's company, she didn't want anyone's sympathy. At least she no longer smelled of blood. She knew what she wanted to do, but she couldn't have explained her compulsion to do it, not even if there had been anyone here she trusted enough to undress her mind in front of. She'd much rather be left to her own devices. This was the reason she was glad it was four AM. She went barefoot, quieter than shod. In one hand she held a small battery-powered CD player and a disk for it. She preferred to leave one hand free.

Down two flights of stairs and along a corridor she passed one guard, who only nodded at her. Guards worked eight hour shifts, he was most of the way through his, and probably not paying as much attention as he should have been. That was one of the things about SHIELD bases that made her uncomfortable. For an intelligence agency, their internal security was slack. She guessed they only expected attack from the outside. Unwise.

Natalia Romanova glanced over her shoulder and let herself in to the large, unfurnished room that served as a melee training arena, physical drill room… whatever training that needed space but no equipment as such, and wasn't likely to involve guns, or a bow in Barton's case. There was no reason she shouldn't be here, she had permission to be in any communal area of the base she pleased whenever she pleased, more or less, she'd just rather do this unobserved. She closed the door gently behind herself, set the CD and player down, and set off round the room at a gentle jog, just to push her heart rate up. Every lap, she ran harder; even for her, what she was going to ask of her body was difficult. When she was tempted to open her mouth to breathe, she stopped and sat down to stretch her legs, preparing them and testing them, any little injury from the mission just gone that she could exacerbate. She found none. She stood up again. There was a simple scaffold for climbing on one side of the room. That would serve as a barre. She went through the warm up she'd learned as a child, drilled in to her head as effectively as how to strip down a Dragunov Rifle. She hesitated before rising to relevé, she had no pointe shoes. She did not fear pain. She felt it as she took her full weight through one toe on each foot, but it was nothing to her. She would not harm herself like this. Only the plié relevés held any challenge now. When she was satisfied that her legs were ready, she went back to her abandoned CD player, inserted the CD and skipped straight to track 12. She needed a second before the track she wanted, number 13, started. She looked round the room, marking it up in her head. If she made the side with the door stage right, yes, that suited her. The room's longer than it is wide. She stood upstage right, facing upstage, waiting for track 12 to finish.

The gaudy xylophone stopped. Natalia Romanova drew a deep breath and rose to pointe. The cello started. She began to edge her way across the 'stage', her steps tiny and as smooth as she could make them, arms rising and falling slowly, 'swan arms'. She turned slowly, arcing round the room. The swan was starting to show distress, the evenness of its flight starting to falter. It had its wound. A chest wound, she'd decided long ago, a penetrating chest wound. She flexed her waist, as though the swan nearly fell, but recovered itself, flying away backwards, her arms movements faster, then slower, then faster again, as though the creature knew that to stop flying meant death. The tight little circles, to her, were spins, from when the wing on the wounded side just didn't flap. The lightness of her arms began to falter, as though the swan was trying to pull itself up by one wing. When the music asked it of her, she dropped to the floor, folding backwards as though she could not hold herself upright, then the swan startled herself back to life, rallying at the last moment, as dying things do, flapping faster, as though the flapping itself could heal her, then ceasing to flap, turning to the audience. Natalia Romanova opened her mouth and breathed fast and shallowly, gasping, clawing for air in a ruined chest. Natalia Romanova knew how things died. The Red Room had been sure to teach its little orphans that. They'd gone in to slaughter-houses, had a go when their hands were big enough for the knives, watched state executions from hidden windows, had a go when the KGB decided that someone needed to die behind their walls. Why not blood the girls a little, teach them to smile as they stabbed a man in the throat? When she'd been with New York City Ballet, she remembered her trainer saying that this was her dance, the dance she was born to do. Every girl in that company had been able to do the steps easily, they'd all been dancing all their lives, they all burned for it, but most of them had faltered at The Dying Swan, Natalia Romanova had made some of them weep when she danced it. The trainer had said he'd never seen a girl so convincingly scared of the end of the piece. She knew the look she was mimicking. She'd brought that look to more than a few, watched them gasp away the dregs of their life, staring pleadingly at her. All the dancers knew how to dance, she knew how to die.

She dropped to one knee, flapping futilely to the last, little whimpers of pain and fright escaping her, then she laid one arm over her forward leg and took a great gasp. She held it for an instant, straining upwards, head, neck and remaining arm, then let herself fall with a great sigh and lay limp, folded neatly, wrists crossed, left leg concealed under her torso, right leg almost hidden by her arms, graceful death. For a long moment she was still.

A sudden sound from by the door. Natalia jumped as though it had been a gunshot, but it was only a hand striking another hand, then again, and again. Barton, her handler, stood leaning against the door and clapping.

"Where did you learn to do that?" She didn't reply. She didn't want to show Barton more of herself than she was obliged to. "Standing on…" He tapped the toe of one shoe on the floor. "Doesn't that hurt?"

"For most people." She said.

"Lab rat perks?" He asked. She didn't much like the term. She nodded, picking up the CD player and taking her disk out. "It's pretty impressive. I've known acrobats who'd kill to move like that." Again, she didn't reply. "Why at 4:30 AM?" He asked.

"I could ask you that." She said. Barton tilted his head in acknowledgement.

"Probably the same reason as you."

Natalia Romanova sighed. "Probably."

"Was a bit of a hellpit, wasn't it?" Barton sat down on the floor as though he intended to stay there. Romanova nodded, pushing down the memories of the past two days that rose up in her like bile. She didn't want his company, she didn't need help. But somehow, she hooked an arm round the scaffold and pulled herself up to sit in it. "I didn't think we were getting out of there." Romanova shrugged. She preferred not to wonder if she'd make it back, just figure out how to survive the next minute, then the minute after that.

"If you hadn't seen the mounted machine gun, we wouldn't have." She replied. Barton snorted.

"Says the person whose idea it was to use the servant passages not the rooftops. How did you know about the chopper?"

"I didn't. I guessed." It was half-true. She'd worked for one of their targets some years before, he'd been looking at helicopter models then, thinking of buying one.

"If you hadn't guessed, we'd both be dead." Probably true.

"We shouldn't have gone through the market." That was the bit that was haunting her. Barton dropped his head.

"Maybe not. I thought they'd leave us alone if they lost us in a crowd, but…" They'd opened fire. Shotguns and automatic rifles, just firing in to the market, trying to break the crowd up, trying to find them. Barton had pulled her down under a stall, a corpse had fallen across the front, hiding them from view. They'd lain there for over an hour, until the screams of pain and terror had given way to screams of grief, then they'd slipped away to the waterfront and got away, killing five more on their way out. Eleven between them in the space of two hours, and how many more as cover? She'd done worse, but she wasn't used to anybody caring. Barton had lain under that stall cursing quietly, been quiet all the way back and told Coulson the death toll as though the words burned his mouth. They hadn't been friendlies, they were just civilians, there was no real cost to SHIELD in their dying. Nobody could pin it on SHIELD. Coulson had seemed sad, but he hadn't seemed angry, so there was no cost to Barton either. But it hurt him. Calling yourselves the good guys meant you were supposed to value life intrinsically, but they still sent assassins out. If killing the targets required a dozen or so civilian lives, did it really matter? Most people's lives changed nothing. They lived, they worked, they died, the world didn't miss them. She had no reason to care that she and Barton had been responsible for dozens of deaths.

They sat in silence for a long while. Natalia Romanova should have gone back to bed, or done something useful. There was nothing to gain by sitting here, but she couldn't summon the impetus to move. At six thirty, a drillmaster threw them out so the recruits could do circuits. Neither of them protested.

"We should probably snatch a few more hours." Barton said.

"Yeah." Romanova agreed.

"See you at ten."

"See you."

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